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What The Wall Street Journal Missed In Its Dangerous Bill Ford Takedown

This article is more than 4 years old.

I've had some dreadful bosses in my time, but at least I never had to work for Rupert Murdoch.

That was my reaction when Murdoch's Wall Street Journal sought to explain why Donald Trump and the state of California are fighting over how much pollution we should accept from our cars and trucks.

 The premise of the February 3 story is simple: U.S. pollution rules are in chaos even as automakers make billion-dollar decisions every day on which cars to build and which to scrap. The story also asserts there might be less chaos if Bill Ford, portrayed as a feckless environmentalist at the helm of the Ford Motor Co., hadn't tried so hard to broker a deal between Trump and Sacramento's intransigent bureaucrats.

I don't do PR for Bill Ford, but I know this story is wrong. And it's dangerous in how it whitewashes Trump's attack on one of America's most important bulwarks against climate change. So here's my rebuttal. 

And if this sounds personal, it is. I've written about these clean car regulations many times for Bloomberg and Forbes.com. And I have a long history with the Wall Street Journal.

I started reading the newspaper after I dropped out of college and started building cars for General Motors in 1973. I relied on the paper to further my education in economics and politics. And then, after I got hired at the Detroit Free Press in 1987, I competed head-to-head on the auto beat with some of the newspaper's best journalists – people like Jacob Schlesinger, Paul Ingrassia, and Joe White. I got my share of scoops, but on many, many days, I felt the lash of their turbocharged reporting. They remain the benchmark against which I measure the newspaper's decline since Murdoch took over in 2007.

 It's not just that 95 percent of the newspaper’s op-eds, columns, and editorials on climate change contain ''misleading and debunked denial talking points," according to data cited by Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist, in his new book Falter. It's that climate was never Murdoch's primary concern. "The antigovernment forces had, at some level, no choice but to deny global warming, because tackling it would have required governments to take strong action," McKibben writes.

So how do these views find their way into Murdoch's news columns?

 Let's set the stage a bit.

When Trump arrived in the White House, he pledged to roll back an Obama-era plan to boost the national fuel economy requirement to 46.7 miles per gallon by 2026. Automotive leaders, including Bill Ford, applauded Trump since cheap gasoline was luring Americans to heavier and less-efficient vehicles. 

Then Trump went a step further. He announced his intent to revoke the authority of California and more than a dozen other states to limit tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions, and require electric cars, even if the federal government won't. Bill Ford and other auto executives urged Sacramento and Washington to compromise since they hoped to avoid protracted litigation and regulations that vary from state to state. 

But in the central assertion in the Wall Street Journal's account, Ford angered Trump by lingering at the bargaining table even in the face of deliberate slow walking by Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board. The final straw came in July of 2019 when Ford joined Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW in signing a separate agreement with California to continue abiding by the state's standards no matter what Trump did in Washington.

It's at that point, according to the newspaper, that Trump "accelerated" plans to revoke California's rule-making authority. GM was miffed at Ford's separate California deal, too, and backed the Trump attack in court. 

"Ford miscalculated the White House's appetite for a deal," the newspaper reported. "Its efforts ultimately backfired, putting it at odds with the administration and other big car makers."

My concern about the story starts with the headline. "The Auto Industry Wanted Easier Environmental Rules. It Got Chaos." In the subhead, the newspaper adds, "Ford miscalculated…." 

The newspaper doesn't come right out and say Bill Ford caused the chaos. But taken together, the headlines sure leave this impression. What they do not say is that Trump was the one scrapping the unified national program that Barack Obama, California, and the automakers had negotiated in 2012.

And then there are the annoying, self-serving quotes from unnamed sources. 

GM might have joined Ford and Honda, according to an unnamed source, if only California had offered MORE incentives for electric cars. So California wasn't electrifying fast enough for Mary Barra, even though GM has been fighting the state's zero-emission car mandate in court for most of the last thirty years, and has now joined Trump in dismantling it entirely. It reminds me of Senator Susan Collins saying she might have sided with Adam Schiff on impeachment if only he hadn't been so rude to her.

Here's another whopper. After Ford joined with Honda and others in their separate California deal, the Department of Justice launched an anti-trust probe. Some Ford officials regarded this as political retribution. But according to an unnamed Wall Street Journal source, the DOJ launched this probe entirely on its own, and not at the behest of the White House.

Well, heads up Murdoch hirelings. The architect of the fuel economy rollback, Jeffrey Rosen, is now the No. 2 man at DOJ. Nobody needs to ask him to bully people. It's in his nature. He's the guy who decided Congress didn't need to see a whistleblower complaint on Trump's jawboning for Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election.

The DOJ dropped the anti-trust probe last week. But the problems with the Wall Street Journal story only grow from there. 

It could be that Trump "accelerated" his plan to revoke the federal waiver California needs to require electric cars only after the state struck its deal with Ford. But it could also be that the president never had any other intention. 

That's what Martha Roberts says. She's a senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, one of several green groups staging protests at auto shows to punish GM and Toyota for backing Trump. To support her claim, Roberts provides an email the EDF obtained through a Freedom of Information request. It was sent on February 7, 2017, by David Schnare, a Trump transition official at the Environmental Protection Agency. The White House was on a fast track, Schnare wrote, to reopen the fuel economy regulations and "withdraw the associated California waiver."

And if Mary Nichols was intransigent during the talks, why might that have been? 

The Wall Street Journal portrays her as trying to defend her bureaucratic turf. But she may have also balked at the chucklehead nature of what Trump was proposing. 

The EPA's own science advisory panel says the agency has made implausible claims on the benefits of the rollback. David Cooke, a vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientist, says the plan will cost money and lives instead of saving them as the administration promised. "The rollback benefits no one but the oil companies," Cooke says.

Nichols may also have been reluctant to give Trump what he wanted because Paradise was one of several California towns to burn down during the talks, and because the state still has the country's worst smog problem. Motor vehicles are California's most significant smog source, and regulators worldwide are turning to electric car mandates as one of their few tools for fighting back. 

And here we come to the most profound flaw in the Wall Street Journal account. The story doesn't mention climate change until the 26th paragraph, and then not as a fact, not as an existential threat that frames the newspaper's view of what it should say. It's only relevant as a belief held by green activists. Bill Ford "considers himself" an environmentalist.

What's not questioned, what's accepted as a fact of life, is Trump's obsession with using the White House as a sledgehammer instead of a bully pulpit. If Trump tweets that Henry Ford would be "rolling over" at how his great-grandson Bill is running the company, if he threatens import-reliant Toyota with trade sanctions to get the company to accept more air pollution, if his DOJ launches spurious anti-trust probes against perceived enemies, then that's just how the game is played these days in Washington. It's how the game is played in Kyiv, too, even according to Republican senators who helped save Trump's job during the impeachment. 

So do I think Bill Ford was naïve in his dealings with Trump? Of course, he was. His CEO in 2017, Mark Fields, was a vocal backer of the Trump rollback. He has the lowest fuel economy of any automaker except GM and Fiat Chrysler, so Trump might be forgiven for thinking he'd join them in seeking relief.

And if Bill Ford underestimated Trump's determination to go to war with California, he reminds me a bit of William E. Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Berlin in 1933.  

Before his appointment, Dodd chaired the University of Chicago history department. He emerged as a clear-eyed foe of Adolph Hitler but was hopelessly naïve at first, according to Erik Larson's 2011 bestseller "In the Garden of Beasts." Dodd wanted to live a modest lifestyle, for example, out of respect for Americans devastated by the Depression. "Incredibly, the new ambassador was even shipping his own car to Berlin – a beat-up old Chevrolet – to underscore his frugality. This in a city where Hitler's men drove about town in giant black touring cars each nearly the size of a city bus."

So if Bill Ford was naïve in coming to terms with Trump, it's a sin he committed with lots of other Americans. He's got a tough job, one that forced him to shake up his management yet again on Friday after a big miss on earnings. Like Mitt Romney, it would have been much easier for Ford to knuckle under to Trump. And like Romney, I find no reason to doubt Ford's claim that he consulted his conscience when deciding not to do so.

So here's my advice to the current crop of Wall Street Journal auto writers. 

First, get yourself a copy of Bill McKibben's book Falter and let yourself get scared by it. Here are just two facts from the book: humans are now injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the fastest pace in 300 million years. This period includes a carbon dioxide-induced mass extinction called End-Permian, which wiped out 90 percent of marine species.

Second, tell your masters you want to sit at the big boy table. Tell them you want to connect your auto writing to the great issues of the day, and that these include whether our grandchildren will be able to survive on the planet and whether they'll still live in a democracy. 

Third, don't be so cavalier about Trump's campaign to emasculate California. I don't claim that the California programs are perfect. Unlike many Tesla investors, I don't see a quick and cheap and easy path for the state to achieve its goal of boosting electric cars and plug-in hybrids from eight percent of statewide sales today to fifty percent by 2030. The vehicles still cost too much, and for many people, the recharging is still too inconvenient.

But without thirty years of prodding from California, there's no way Mary Barra could have boasted to Wall Street analysts last week that she'd developed a new, super-flexible, all-electric vehicle architecture. There's no way Boris Johnson could be promising to ban the sale of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles entirely from the United Kingdom in just fifteen years.

I don't do PR for Mary Nichols, either, but I will say this. She's managing the world's longest-running and most comprehensive experiment on how to fight climate change. She’s doing it in a place with both a vibrant democracy and a growing economy. She's not just promoting electric cars. She wants electric freight trucks and more mass transit, plus fuels, farms, and factories that emit less carbon dioxide. She's writing an encyclopedia, a roadmap, that Greta Thunberg's generation will consult over and over as they move off the streets and into the halls of power. It's a crusade that's broadly popular with the people of California, and it deserves to be covered even by people who work for Rupert Murdoch with far more attention and respect.

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